


This One Tears them Open Again

by prodigalDaughter



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Dead People, Doomed Timelines, Dreambubbles, in which Gamzee gets a much-needed kick to the heart, or diamond-analogous organ anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-22
Updated: 2012-12-22
Packaged: 2017-11-22 00:21:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/603712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prodigalDaughter/pseuds/prodigalDaughter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gamzee wanders through potentials, and he doesn't understand what he's done wrong, until he does. Originally for the meme.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This One Tears them Open Again

Everyone seems to think dream bubbles are confusing, but they're no more confusing than any other part of the world to you. You've never expected one kind of place to keep being itself, and when it did all the time, that never made it seem less likely to change any minute. The world does what it wants to, and just because this place changes in bigger ways than your hive or the beach or the caverns ever did doesn't make it any different. Just maybe a little more lively. A lively home of the dead, which is beautiful. And you change too, you change out of nowhere, and worrying on it isn't going to do no good. You learnt that.

You know nothing is under your control; you do the same thing and the same thing and you expect different results.You leave it in the hands of fate, and Karkat, and life, and whimsy.

Even when you're fairly lucid, it doesn't bother you.

So you go walking and you watch the dark season by the beach change to someone's hive, change to Prospit, change to a big beautiful plateau with curling symbols carved into the stone, change to Karkat's land. This place is one of the best of all wonderful places. It's a little hot for you, but that reminds you of him, some, like he's got his arms around you and you can hear his bloodpusher thumping fast in his chest. It makes you feel like you're living inside him, this place; his beautiful colour all around you and bright and unashamed, river-veins and rock-bones. 

You sit down, because damn if there was ever a better place to rest your ass than this ruined bridge with the red river pounding away below you. Maybe you'll see him. 

The dreambubbles are dear to you for two reasons: Tavros and Karkat. Tavros is dead and scared of you, and you're not so sure why on the latter, but sometimes you see him out here. Catching glimpses is great, because he's moving in them, and it's hard to make him move when you're awake. Real hard.

Karkat you don't see a lot when you're awake because there's some people who want to kill you, and they're his friends, so you can't get at him all too well and he has to be the one to find you, and you tend to be hard to find. You're pretty mad at them for treating you so. It disrespects him, doesn't it? That they'd think he wouldn't stop you from hurting nobody it weren't all right to hurt. Like they don't trust him. That gets you riled up, the idea that they're not treating him kind. 

You're thinking on it when you see him at the end of the bridge, backing away from you. 

You throw your arms out, and you grin, and you jackknife yourself back onto your feet to come towards him. He is shaking his head minutely, fervently. His chest is heaving. His eyes are white and wide. He smells like terror, and your arms fall. He isn't yours.

Poor sweet thing. He is dead. 

You take a moment just to look at him, and that confuses him greatly. As you scan across his small body trying to suss him out, why he's acting so, he acts so. More than he had before. Particularly, he leaps upon you and tries to tear your throat out.

You are more confused than you have been in a sweep as you shove at his chest, keeping him at arms' length as his screams and sobs curdle your spit in your mouth, his claws digging into your wrists like he just wants to hurt you, doesn't mind how or where. You haven't seen him this much of a mess in a long damn time and you are frightened for him, for your beautiful boy who has always been the one to shush you down, to hold you quiet, to keep you still. He is crying and crying as he makes you bleed, and you're spouting words you don't even comprehend but you hope that he will. Why in the hell is he dead is the first thing, and didn't you get whoever did it, please to tell you you got whoever did it, and he screams louder and swears at you until his face is burning. 

"Who did you," you stutter out again, "who did you? C'mon, come on, I'll make it up to you, come on bro tell me. Tell me tell me I can't do nothing without no concept of who nothing needs doing on. Who did you?"

He spits at you and wrenches himself out of your grasp to stumble backwards, staring at you like you're a wild beast, as if he wasn't your tamer. And then he is red.

His blood pours down his face until you cannot see his skin. His posture stutters, leaning heavily now on the leg that isn't a cracked wreck; his skull is bashed in so deep on one side that his horn is halfway inside his head, smeared with pan matter that trickles down his forehead. There's a big crush in half his thorax, and through the corresponding tear in his jumper you can see a few bone flanges snapped off and piercing his flesh. His ear's bitten off halfway down, and your guts overturn when you recognize your teeth as the ones that made that mark. You fall to your knees and he is upon you again, and you don't know anything to do but go limp and let him.

The scars that your Karkat made you clean and dress, this one tears open again. He pounds his fist into your nose, thrashes fitfully at your chest until you lie on the ground, holds you fast by the horn as he pulls out his sickle, and the only thing that you would change is that you won't carry these wounds when you wake. His blade is to your throat, and he squeezes his eyes shut, and he sobs. 

You realise that you want him to kill you, and that you wish it would stick. He is the one who should kill you, because you were the one who tore him apart. You see his wounds and you can almost hear the crunch of his bones, you can smell his death, feel the give of his skull, taste his leathery skin between your teeth. You are evil.

You'd thought people just had standards you didn't get. Karkat was your guide through the world of Other Trolls, telling you what you did that frightened them, holding your hand until you didn't need to upset them any more. You did your own thing until he came for you, nudged you onto the road of quiet and dry. He had never blamed you. Sometimes he'd say how you were trying so fucking hard, he could see it, but the truth had been you weren't. You were just walking on, letting yourself change with the whimsy, and he'd come and blown you onto this calmer path. 

And now this one is trembling as he holds his sickle over you, screaming words, fuckhell he's saying words and you didn't even hear them, he's explaining to you in detail exactly what you used to break each bit of him, how you'd laughed while you'd done it, and each and every manner in which you are the worst creature that ever had a thought. 

He slams his forehead into your chest so hard you can't breathe, and he sobs a few words of confession against your sign.

"And I was even pale for you, you bastard."

You sit up with violent force, and mercifully awaken before you can bleed out against his sickle. 

Karkat is there with you. How he found you you will never know, perched on a shelf in the bowels of the facility to sleep, but he is there, his hot arms around your cold body as he rocks you gently through your hideously true nightmare. You put your hands on him, you feel his solid skull and his wiry thorax, and you clasp onto him and cry into his bones. 

You think about Nepeta, and she's a person. A person. Like how Karkat is a person, and she isn't your person but she was somebody's person, Equius's person, and he was hers, and you think about how her eyes looked when she jumped for you and suddenly it isn't funny anymore. None of it is funny anymore. You have never in your life been this empty of mirth. You aren't sure if you're yourself, which doesn't even make sense because you've been so different and always been yourself. You have always been laughing, and the things that weren't to laugh at you just walked on past, let happen and you might have lent sympathy, a few words over Trollian, a pair of long arms, but never did you stop and, yourself, grieve. 

You are now grieving, and it's like your blood-pusher burst and is flooding your chest. You are grieving your heart out against your moirail, who you pity so much and you would never ever hurt (says the pain in your chest, but your lagging eyes see bone and blood), and he's combing your hair back with his fingers and whispering about how he's here and you don't have to worry, and how much he pities you and trusts you, and he is so impossibly _here,_ and he doesn't know. He doesn't know what you just saw, what the other you did, and you are suddenly aware that you have to tell him, and that maybe he won't want you anymore. 

But you do tell him. You shudder out the words, touching each place he had been bleeding, kissing his head and the curve of his ear and never letting your teeth touch him. You are crying, and now he is crying, and his tears are hot like his blood and like his skin and like his pity as he folds you up tighter in his tiny arms and tells you you're the one that didn't kill him so you're the one that got it right. He thanks you for telling him. He says that was the right thing to do, and wet as you are inside you take the tiny victory and clasp onto it, and want more.

It is his job to fix you. Maybe you had to be broken open before he could start to put your pieces together right.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally for this prompt on the meme: http://homesmut.dreamwidth.org/38154.html?thread=39506442


End file.
